We learned on our first trip to Europe last summer, when we were visiting Cambridge for the first time, that we enjoy discovering “favorite places” and then frequenting them numerous times during the course of a stay. It’s probably because an environment with just the right atmosphere for a good meal or just the right ambience for a meaningful conversation, or even just the right vibe for reading a good book, is such a rare find these days.

In Cambridge, that special place was Café Rouge. In Oxford it was The Quad. In Brea it’s Market City Café or Diedrich’s Coffeehouse, hands down.

Paris is no exception.

Besides finding our favorite place for lunch (Café Madeleine) and for dinner (L’Ecluse) fairly quickly, we also discovered our favorite place to set down for an afternoon snack, coke, and cider. That place is Café LeNotre, quaintly situated in the park and gardens near the top of the Champs Elysees.

Café LeNotre is the perfect place to spend an artist’s afternoon. In other words, it’s the place to go when you want a few hours of uninterrupted time to read, write, think, talk, or take photographs of the more meaningful and moving things in life.

That’s just the sort of thing Kirk and I love to do, so we spent a few artist afternoons at this very special café – a place we could count on for great ambience and service. One such afternoon yielded the following photographs, the first (more artsy) one by Kirk and the second (more commonplace) one by me.

What do you think?